Bitcoin Hits New Record and Rolls Back with Bitcoin Gold

In what was one of the most eventful weeks for the cryptocurrency in a while, Bitcoin hit a new record high of $6,100 thanks to high market volumes and an overall bullish interest, only to drop down again rapidly as another offshoot cryptocurrency called Bitcoin Gold split from its blockchain. Thus, in an even bigger trading wave that the one that pushed the price up, Bitcoin lost around $600 of its value in only a few days.

The new cryptocurrency is the second Bitcoin offshoot and it appeared on October 24th, about three months after Bitcoin Cash was created in a similar way and a month before the Segwit2x split is scheduled for launch. Reportedly, the reason for the split of Bitcoin Gold is to help preserve Bitcoin’s decentralized nature by making the new cryptocurrency easier to mine without making serious investments into special mining hardware.

Speaking to Bloomberg, Robert Kuhne, one of the strategists for Bitcoin Gold, said that the split was “required to make fair mining accessible to the general public once again”. Thus, according to the Bitcoin Gold website, the new cryptocurrency will not require any powerful ASIC machines to mine it but only standard gaming GPU cards, just like with Ethereum.

Sellers Still in Control

During the past week, Bitcoin’s price went from trading at $5,300 to reaching its new record of $6,189.38 on Saturday. Yet, with the imminent split of the blockchain announced through online portals, the price went sliding down to its weekly low of $5,397.88, which was hit on Wednesday right after the split.

Naturally, the record price increase also drove the market cap to record highs of $102 billion while the Bitcoin Gold aftermath pumped up the trading volume to a massive $3 billion. Currently, the trading volume is back down to $2.1 billion while the market cap sits at $92 billion.

Our technical analysis shows that the market is still pro-sell, with 9 out of 12 oscillators and 8 out of 12 moving averages sending a selling signal. However, the SMA 100 is still over the SMA 200 on this time-frame, indicating that the path of least resistance is upwards. Short-term signals are also showing that a buying interest is forming, giving hope that further price rollbacks will be subdued. If buyers keep pushing, we will see the price growth continue, albeit slowly at first.

Bitcoin Gold Website DDoS-ed Right after Split

Bitcoin Gold was valued $60-200 after its split, depending on the exchanges where it appeared. In those exchanges that showed support for the new cryptocurrency, Bitcoin users were given a “balance snapshot” they could later use to claim their Bitcoin Gold coins. But the more interesting news, however, was that its site was knocked down by a massive DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack almost immediately after the fork was completed.

The Twitter profile of Bitcoin Gold immediately tweeted a response short after, saying there was a massive attack on their cloud site that launched 10 million requests per minute. According to Motherboard, in the Slack chat channel of the Bitcoin Gold community it was revealed that most of the IP addresses engaged in the DDoS attack were coming from China.

Luckily, the attack was subdued a few hours after it was launched and currently the site is up and running again. However, those interested in getting their hands on Bitcoin Gold would have to wait until November 1st, when the code for the coin will officially be launched and users will be allowed to mine the new cryptocurrency.